Community Input, Kirill Live Tonight, 3K Likes

Community Input

It's sometimes held against us, but we think very highly of
our fans and our community. We end up calling NPCs after them (hi Arhu), we create encounters with them (hello Shrimpo). We also don't just take their
feedback for granted: we often find valuable ideas in their posts, ideas that we implement, changes that we do make...

Divinity: Original Sin will not be treated differently. We
are for instance taking another look at the RPG system, taking your feedback
into account. We are reading your forum posts, your comments on Kickstarter,
your private messages and emails, and even if we don't always find the time to
answer, we do pick out the things that we think are important or fun. Here are
two examples.

Burning zombies

The following message was sent to Swen, and unfortunately,
it will not be implemented as a surprise, it will just be implemented.

"Sorry for two
PM's in one day, this idea I want hidden and made as a surprise if you like it
enough to implement.

(...) fire can burn
the skin off a zombie and they become a skeleton. When they became a skeleton,
their traits and attack methods changed to that of a skeleton. Their HP
remained where it was from the initial attack of the fire or previous attacks.
The fire would simply burn off their skin over a few attack rounds (...)

Since so much detail
has gone into this, that would be interesting to have implemented."

Thanks to this successful Kickstarter, we can give monsters more
interesting behaviours, more specific attacks and powers (and weaknesses), so why
not create this effect for the zombies? As
it turns out, an unknown scribe had already reported on this in his "Source
User's Guide To Adventuring". What a coincidence!

Excerpt from "A Source User's Guide To Adventuring"

"One of the more
nasty encounters you can have with the undead, is to be attacked by zombies.
Many make the mistake of underestimating these dim-witted corpses and very
often they are regretting their hubris as their innards are being drawn from
their shredded bellies.

Zombies are slow, yes,
but they are highly resilient to most weapons you can carry, and -neither
fearing nor feeling pain- they'll pursue their prey relentlessly. My advice
would therefore be to play a little trick on them that makes these putrefying
pests a lot easier to deal with.

The trick? Fire! If
you are versed in the basics of Source wizardry, conjuring a searing fireball
is easy as pie, so cast a barrage of flame and admire your handiwork as the
flesh burns right off your assailant's bones. It won't be defeated just yet,
but it will be a zombie no longer! You'll now be fighting a skeletal warrior,
and you can imagine how much more effective your trusty war hammer, mace or
mallet will have suddenly become!"

Visuals: Ambient, Bloom, Fog, Contrast

Our art director, Koen Van Mierlo, dived in, and had the
following to say:

"While working on
the lighting and colors of the environments, I had to take into account the
speed of the characters and the pace of combat. I had to make sure the visuals
were not interfering with game play: I had to strike a good balance between
clarity and nice looking visuals. We noticed that high contrast imagery was
hard to read and was affecting game play too much; so we decided to go for less
contrasted environments.

Combat and movement
speed have since changed a lot, and this meant that certain decisions regarding
game play and visual clarity were not necessarily valid anymore. So after
reading the forum post of Xodetaetl, Swen asked me to reiterate on the lighting
to see if it would be possible to increase the contrast. So that's what I did. Now that we have more time to iterate over the game, thanks to this Kickstarter, I tried out different settings. I ended up toning down the ambient settings, decreasing the bloom, tweaking the fog
distance settings and tampering with the contrast values."

Kirill on Twitch TV

Don't forget! In exactly two hours, Kirill will perform a
live concert especially for you. You don't need a ticket, you don't need to go
anywhere, it's streaming live over this wonderful thing we call the internet.

you can almost guarantee very few people have balanced/calibrated displays, so i'd vote for having advanced colour/rendering options in-game so people can tune as much or as little of the visuals as they wish. i'd rather have this in the options than have to rely on ENB or SweetFX to configure things.
perhaps theres a way to make these visual settings community shareable too.

I'd like to see feature to make NPC more useful, especially in combat.
Usually for optimum control, npc partner are usually useless, or, just a distraction for enemy so player can carry out bigger strike, waiting for cool down, etc.
NPC partner either be there as auto pilot mana shield, or just be there for story purpose, which is very let down, and sort of knock you out of this RPG world.

If it's possible, I'd like to see some dynamic arrangement that makes NPC or some story relevant characters more lively:
1. be able to pull enemy to NPCs, ie, guards that either fight with you, or scared and do something dumb. Player can choose to buff them to calm them down(or knock them out?), or direct their skills and movement(like a team command?), or leave them be, or transform them into temporary stronger creature, or other crazy stuff. Just make them more useful than just there to provide dialogs.

2.surprise outcome, to make choices more relevant, in above example, if one NPC happen to hate a player so much, he/she might decide to turn their back against players. Just when you think the battle is over and prepare to restore health and all the spells in cool down. If the roll successed, you might be in trouble that the buffed NPC-turned-dragon simply hated you do this to him(or just doubt that you steal his stuff even if he has no proof), or he just simply think he can take on players and turn to the dark side.

3.No more invincible/must die characters, if player go mad, and decide to wipe the town, they should be able to do it, they lost the quests, if no one escapes, it will only be rumor in another part of the world. I don't like invincible NPCs simply because he can't not die here for story purpose, so we just abuse his invincibility to get more Exp. Or simply die with scripted event for story purpose without a proper fight. That sucks majorly almost every time it happened in a game( at least for me).

4. Be able to buy/sell with any NPC, if condition check passes.(ie they don't hate you, they have enough money, etc. ) There could still be shops, but transaction is what people do. Not like some random pass-by would have a crazy enchanted unique sword to buy from, but so that it's a more interesting interaction with the world. Say if you sell a sword to the guard NPC just fought with you and impressed by your skills. you get new loot, the NPC guard appreciate your stuff and gladly buy it off you with reasonable price. If some time later you come back to this spot and that Guard is practicing with your sword or is fighting another mob, wouldn't it be a great experience? Even if he no longer has it, it could still be a topic to talk about, and maybe player wanna know where the sword is, ended up in who's hand, etc.

Overall, I think NPC is seriously under explored are in RPGs in general. I hope this won't break gameplay wise too much, and consider this is financially a much smaller scale project compare to say Eternity or just funded Torment, but I think you guys have the tools in place, just may or may not have the human resource to put in efforts like this.

I'd suggest you guys not to dwell too long on ideal lighting and contrast settings. You really can't please everybody. Just add a basic gamma setting. There's always ENB for the people who want more advanced control over light and gamma settings.

My suggestion is (as dark souls 2 is in theme) don't add difficulty settings, just tweak it on a single one to perfection

Also keep it dark, dark, so it will be like discovering a treasure when you walk up with a flame next to a mural or something. I know artists probably hate this idea.. but please. hidden gems have bigger impact on the long run

After some deliberation, taking arguments posted here into account, I'm split in two on which ones I like best myself. There indeed doesn't seem to be a consensus, not even between me, myself and I.
Therefore, if technically possible without too much hassle, I think that making somewhat advanced color options available to the end user could cater for the different expectations, tastes, hardware configurations, etc. end users have.
On the other hand, some people probably couldn't care less, so having presets, for example mimicking the two styles depicted here, could keep them oblivious about the matter.

the before after images are affected a lot by monitor quality, on my laptop I can't even tell the difference, but on my PC monitor they were very different. Its nice having darker blacks and that is a very modern look(which is good i think) as long as we don't lose any detail. Its a tricky balance but those screenshots are lookin pretty good to me!

first the first (cave), I like the foggyness ( in the background ) , although the after makes the background ( destination pop, the light at the end of the tunnel ?) so maybe tone down the foggyness and it could be spot on.

second one I like the green heu but the shadows are a tad too hard (but its close )

thirth one, here in this setting i like the hard shadow and prefer the after

Superbacker

It definitely looks like more detail on pics one and three. Picture two has the hazy areas, but I get the feeling it's *supposed* to be foggy and you can't even tell in the original picture (though I can't be 100% sure).

Don't forget to spread the word about this new update on these forums
http://weresheep.net/doku.php…I'm a little bit afraid to do that, aparently 1 post + another post after a couple of hours is considered as spamming somewhere *cough*...http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php… ....*cough* and you'll get banned like me. So it's safer if somebody else will post to some of those threads, not only one person.

Count me in on those that prefer the former settings. The new ones remind me too much of the super contrasty ENB settings people have used in Skyrim. They might make more "vivid" screen caps, but they're not exactly great to actually play with IMO.

You are hearing on input?
Forget the classless system and make something more advanced! The best is neither a classless system nor a class based system, but something in between.
-> Classes for some skills + a large variety of skills that every class can or cannot have.

That way when you assign every npcs/character a class, it will lead to a bigger diversity. And certain classes can have benefits and weaknesses. Weaknesses are difficulty to get into a classless system.

WOW!!!! Great work tweaking the lights. I'm really impressed with the results. Small tweaks like these ones makes a lot of difference in the game immersiveness.
.
And i liked the idea about the zombies too, really cool feature.

Yeah I think its easier to see all the components that make up the scene in before for the last picture.
The after may be more atmospheric but I feel like am squinting to see the details in the dark areas.

@Caro
Upon reading your concerns, I started fiddling with the settings of my monitor. I must say that if I revert it to its default settings, I do get what you are saying. The reduced overall brightness and increased contrast hide details that could be seen before indeed.

However, with my modified settings (especially the gamma config), the new versions look noticeably better to me. I like how the floor in the first cage for example has less glare, giving the impression that there is a kind of white film covering the image.

On the other hand, It is also this glare which actually (ironically) helps recognizing distinct features with the default settings.

I think that having in-game controls for gamma and brightness/contrast might be a good idea to cater for the different needs and hardware configurations out there.